Portsmouth South MP Flick Drummond has chaired an Alcohol Health Summit that brought experts together to tackle the problem of excess drinking in the city.
The morning event, organised by Portsmouth City Council's Safer Portsmouth Partnership, was at the Central Library last Friday and attended by around 60 people and experts.
It brought together leading doctors, the police, charities and local authority teams to discuss how the challenges Portsmouth face can be addressed.
The city is the third-worst in the country for admissions to hospital for alcohol-related issues, and the problem is a major public health crisis.
Flick requested the summit after reading the Public Health England statistics regarding alcohol problems in the city.
The event heard that there were major challenges to tackling the problem, but that progress was being made.
Superintendent Will Schofield talked about teamwork between police and other agencies and praised a PCC initiative to persuade shops not to sell the super-strength beer and cider which drives much of the alcohol health damage.
Professor Nick Sheron from the University of Southampton told delegates of the shocking statistics on the impact of alcohol. 1/3 of suicides are alcohol related. Alcohol now causes more premature deaths than tobacco and he called for the introduction of minimum unit pricing to cut the consumption of cheap super strength cider.
Karen Monteith of PCC’s Community Alcohol Partnership explained how families face a problem of children adopting unhealthy attitudes to alcohol from their parents and how schools try to educate young people. She said that 45% of children in Portsmouth say they are given alcohol by their parents.
Richard Aspinall, a consultant liver specialist at Queen Alexandra Hospital considered Portsmouth to be a 'northern city in the south', with public health outcomes worse than southern cities of comparable size.
Portsmouth has the highest incidence of hepatitis C in the Wessex region and he emphasised the interplay of alcohol with other public health challenges and diseases.
Others talked about the cost of hospital care of those with alcohol related diseases and Dr Janet Maxwell, Director of Public Health at PCC, highlighted that alcohol illnesses have real costs for the local economy as well as the patients.
She said Portsmouth has 'come a long way from a really bad place and starting to see the tide turn'.
Flick closed the summit and said she will bring together the information from the different speakers and produce a report to help publicise the costs and challenges of alcohol harm to the wider public.
She added that she hoped the summit would be the first meeting of its kind so that progress towards reducing harm can be monitored and best practice shared.
'It’s a quite shocking statistic that Portsmouth is the third worst place in England for health problems directly related to alcohol," she said afterwards.
'I said at the time of the release of this statistic earlier this year that we needed to get to the bottom of the root causes for these deaths. Put bluntly: this is not the sort of podium finish this city should be having.
'Much has been done and much will be done by all the agencies to tackle this problem and I was heartened to see so much enthusiasm to tackle it.
'Many thanks to the city council’s Safer Portsmouth Partnership for organising the event and I’m sure there will be follow up meeting to monitor progress.'